NEWTOWN, CT — The only sound was the soft whooshing of the traffic on I-84. Saturday night had just barely become Sunday morning. You turned off the freeway at Exit 10 — "Newtown/Sandy Hook," the sign read — and made the turn up the hill, and I-84 disappeared behind a gentle curve in the road, and a thin screen of trees, and the only evidence it was there, the only evidence of a wider, passing world, was the whispered and gentle melody of the cars that were passing by this small and wounded place.

Saturday night had just become Sunday morning, and Newtown was a place of strange, scattered illumination. There were still some houses lit for Christmas, but not many. In fact, there were just few enough of them for their lights to seem odd and discorroborate with the events of the weekend. There was, it seemed, a television truck secreted around every corner, small, bright islands of light scattered on every corner, with well-tailored men and women standing in the middle of each of them while larger men in down vests shouldered cameras, and all their breath becoming clouds in the air around them. There was a notable example out on the lawn in front of the Methodist church. And then there were the impromptu shrines, small clusters of candles on the ground, spreading out in lines and arcs, their flickering giving a strange, shadowed cast to the Beanie Babies and teddy bears that were piled up around them. If you turned right off the exit ramps, and drove downtown, television vans lining both sides of the road and someone doing a stand-up on the Methodists's lawn, you would have found a huge (and growing) one of these at the base of the town's Christmas tree, which stands at the bottom of the hill leading up towards the Sandy Hook Elementary School. As Saturday night became Sunday morning, that road was still blocked, a very cold-looking local cop standing guard next to his prowler while, half-a-block away, more people arrived with more candles to lay on the ground under the tree. Turn left at the end of the ramp, and go all the way up the hill toward City Hall, in front of which was parked another television van, and there was another of these shrines at the base of a towering flagpole. Between the candles at the base of the Christmas tree, and the candles at the base of the flagpoles, there was St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, and its entire lawn seemed to be glowing. Across the street, darkened camera trucks were lined up, one next to the other, and there were two signs marking the entrance to the church's parking lot. "NO PRESS," they said.

Saturday night had become Sunday morning, and there were two of these shrines in front of the church. One was a smaller one not far from a lighted Nativity scene. The other one was larger, and it was centered within an existing shrine that had been built as a tribute to the parish's parents. And their children. The light was thick on the ground there, the steady dance of the candlelight looking like a wave across the lawn in the night. And that was how it was as Saturday night became Sunday morning, on the night before the president came town.

It had been a weekend in which vast schools of red herrings had run through our national millrace. The conspicuous performance-sorrow of the television anchors. (CNN's Don Lemon took to the air at one point and, basically, apologized for having to do his job.) The endless warning to "hug your kids like I'm going home to hug mine." (And good for you.) Truckloads of bad theology. Some oddball moral bullying from right and left. Everything is a red herring if spoken of in isolation. Guns are a red herring, if we don't talk about restricting the access that damaged people have to advanced weaponry in the context of the misbegotten mental-health system in this country. Arm the teachers. Turn every school into a fortress. But don't forget to hug your kid before you send him off to this militarized, narcotic nightmare. In the larger world, the world you could hear going by as you left the highway, there was already an awful congealing of these terrible events in the public mind as something too large to comprehend, and as something with so many causes that it was beyond our ability to anticipate or prevent. One pastor got on TV and blamed "the evil in the heart of man." (Unless you adopt his particular interpretation of monotheism, there is something inherent in you that might put seven bullets into a seven-year old.) This is convenient, because this is something against which we cannot legislate.

The actual truth was not in the hot glare of the television lamps. It was in those hundreds of other lights, their tiny flames rippling across the ground, as Saturday night became Sunday morning in this dark and wounded place. They were both prayer and testimony. They were both memory and promise. But, even then, as Saturday night became Sunday morning, many of them were going out, their wicks blown cold by the winter's wind. They will not last forever. Sooner or later, they will all go dim and then exhaust themselves. The Beanie Babies and the teddy bears will be crated up and (perhaps) given away to children who are still alive. The television vans will leave, and there will be darkness up and down the hills again as a Saturday night becomes Sunday morning. What will we see around us then? What will the country look like? What shadows will make us jump? That will be the test of all the strange and scattered illuminations. Will those hundreds of flames survive, somewhere, in the people who came to see them in the small and wounded place, as Saturday night became Sunday morning, the day on which the president would come to town? While I was standing there amid the candles, it struck me that I had come to this spot from Washington, D.C., the concerns of which seemed to be those of another universe. I was not sure that the candlelight, now moving in waves across my feet, ever would reach that far, and I thought to myself how many more things are more worth cursing than the darkness is.